My mother grins coldly. “Withholding. She did it to me my whole life. In those early weeks, after she’d ransacked my room to no avail, when she still thought she could torture the location of the deck out of me, she would withhold seemingly small things. I could only drink a teaspoon of water at a time. Or I wasn’t allowed soap until the kids at school were all calling me ‘Scary Mary.’ Or I found the bathroom locked and wasn’t given a key until I started peeing outside and became so constipated she had to take me to the ER. One week she made me eat split pea soup for every meal because she knew how much I hated it. If I puked, I had to clean it up myself.”

I take a step toward her with my hand out, to touch her arm or her back, to comfort her. But she jumps up, skirting my fingers like they are the ends of a live wire.

I don’t know what to say. Do I defend Moony’s memory? Do I refuse to believe her? Do I apologize for being on the receiving end of everything that was best about my grandmother, while she received everything that was worst? I am racked with a kind of survivor’s guilt and a relief that I am ashamed to admit. “I can’t imagine,” I tell her.

“No, you can’t,” she responds with hard eyes. “She withheld all kinds of things hoping I’d break. But mostly she withheld herself. She stopped showing me affection, stopped telling me she loved me. And then she withheld you. She still wanted to break me after all those years. But I’m stronger than her.”

She laughs genuinely now, a full-throated, roaring gaw-gaw-gaw sound like the call of some prehistoric bird. She laughs and laughs until she’s clutching her stomach with one arm and her eyes are spilling over with fat, ironic tears. “And the best part?” she finally spits out. “The best part is that I left the deck with you. She had it the whole time!”

I am watching myself watch her laugh as though I have left my body and am floating in the back of the room. I want to slap her. I want to hug her. I want to run. But I can’t move. And so I just stand there, in my watercolor way, a wash of faint lines and pale colors, quivering with the vibration of her laughter, which masks her anger, which masks her sorrow, which masks her pain. I think of the Magician, with his mismatched face, and see him reflected in my mother’s reaction. None of her expressions fit together right. They are all converging at once, a pileup of emotion.